Reading Series
Pablo Medina is the author of eleven books, among them the poetry collection Points of Balance/Puntos de apoyo (2005) and the novel The Cigar Roller, which was a Book Sense Notable for 2005. In 2008, Medina and fellow poet Mark Statman published a new English version of García Lorca's Poet in New York, which John Ashbery called "the definitive version of Lorca's masterpiece." Acclaimed as "lyrical and powerfully evocative" and "deserving a prominent spot in today's literature of exile," Medina's work has appeared in various languages, among them Spanish, French, German, and Arabic and in periodicals and magazines all over the world. Winner of numerous awards for his writing and teaching, Medina was on the board of AWP from 2002-2007, serving as Board President in 2005-2006.
Steve Yarbrough is the author of eight books. His newest novel, Safe from the Neighbors, will be published by Knopf in January of 2010. His 2006 novel The End of California (Knopf) was a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction and is slated for publication soon in Polish translation. His novel Prisoners of War (Knopf, 2004) was a finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award, and his 1999 novel The Oxygen Man (McMurray & Beck) won the California Book Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the Mississippi Authors Award. His other books are the novel Visible Spirits (Knopf, 2001) and the story collections Veneer (University of Missouri Press, 1998), Mississippi History (Missouri, 1994), and Family Men (LSU Press, 1990). His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and has also been published in Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, Japan and Poland.
November 4: David Ferry and Alan Shapiro
David Ferry has published numerous books of poems including On the Way to the Island; Strangers; and Of No Country I Know, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bingham Poetry Prize from Boston Book Review, and finalist for The New Yorker Book Award and the L.L. Winship / PEN New England Award. He has completed translations of Horace and Virgil, including The Epistles of Horace, recipient of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His translation, Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other awards and honors include a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine. Ferry is the Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College.
Alan Shapiro has published ten books of poems including Happy Hour, winner of the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Mixed Company, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry; and The Dead Alive and Busy, winner of the 2001 Kingsley Tufts Award. His most recent book, Old War, won the 2009 Ambassador Book Award in poetry. He is also the author of three books of prose, including The Last Happy Occasion, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography in 1997. Shapiro has received additional awards and honors, including two awards from the National Foundation for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and an award in literature from the Academy of American Arts and Letters. He has taught in the MFA Creative Writing program at Warren Wilson and Northwestern University and is presently the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
December 1: Victor LaValle
Victor LaValle is the author of slapboxing with jesus, a collection of stories and winner of the PEN/Open Book Award, and two novels, Big Machine, and The Ecstatic, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His work has been included in many anthologies, including Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, and Sometimes Rhythm, Sometimes Blues, and he has contributed essays to periodicals such as GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and The Washington Post. LaValle has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a United States Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship and has been Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Columbia University. He also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Previous visitors to the Reading Series have included:
Betty Adcock, Marjorie Agosin, Jane Brox, Samantha Chang, Junot Diaz, Stuart Dischell, Stephen Nunn, B.H. Fairchild, Brendan Galvin, Thomas Glave, David Haynes, Linda Hogan, Luisa Igloria, Mark Jarman, A. Van Jordan, Allison Joseph, Artemis Leontis, Gregory Orr, Patricia Powell, Martha Rhodes, Richard Russo, Michael Ryan, Jim Shepard, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Eamonn Wall, Eleanor Wilner, and Terri Witek